About this item
In a trance-like state, Albert walks--from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia--all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. Andr in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life.
About the Author
Maud Casey lives in Washington, D.C. She is an Associate Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson and was a faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in 2009. She has received the Italo Calvino Prize (2008) , the St. Francis College Literary Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2008-2009 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in and